Despite the fact that many people believe electronic cigarettes are a safe alternative to the traditional kind – and manufacturers encourage this idea – they can actually have some serious side effects. In addition to the variety of toxic and cancer-causing chemicals, the fact that e-cigarettes sometimes explode, and the potential for poisoning, researchers have found that the use of electronic cigarettes can increase the risk of myocardial infarction (heart attack).
Using the National Health Interview Surveys of 2014 and 2016, which were conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, researchers from the University of California – San Francisco examined the association between e-cigarette use, cigarette smoking, and heart attacks in nearly 70,000 people. The study, published in August 2018 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, was the first to examine the relationship between e-cigarette use and heart attack, found that daily use of both types of cigarettes was associated with increased odds of having had a heart attack. Former and occasional e-cigarette use were not significantly associated with having had a heart attack, but former and occasional cigarette smoking was. Both electronic and conventional cigarettes contain nicotine, a highly addictive substance, dangerous flavoring chemicals like diacetyl, which is linked to lung disease, toxic metals such as lead, and ultrafine particles that can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and acute myocardial infarction.
Most adults who use electronic cigarettes also smoke traditional ones, believing that replacing some cigarettes with the electronic version is healthier. Unfortunately, using both at the same time is even more dangerous than continuing to smoke cigarettes. According to one author of the study, a UCSF professor of medicine and the director of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, someone who continues to smoke daily while also using electronic cigarettes daily increases the odds of a heart attack by a factor of five. The odds of having a heart attack were about the same for those who continued to smoke traditional cigarettes daily as those who switched to daily electronic cigarette use.
Among the 9,352 current and former electronic cigarette users in the study, 333 (3.6 percent) had suffered a heart attack at some point, with the highest percentage (6.1 percent) being among those who used electronic cigarettes daily. In the study, one fourth of the 2,259 people who currently used electronic cigarettes were former smokers of traditional cigarettes, and about 66 percent of current electronic cigarette users were also current cigarette smokers.
There is some good news, however. The risk of heart attack starts to drop immediately after you stop smoking, and researchers believe the same is true of electronic cigarettes. It’s also possible that someone who uses electronic cigarettes very briefly can escape with no harmful effects.
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